Talking to BW Retail World, in an exclusive chat, Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing, APAC, Motorola outlines the retail strategy of the brand, the growth of the brand, its in-store experiences, the exclusive Flipkart Experiential Store, and more
When it comes to the pop-up retail format, the trend seems to have caught like wildfire across brands and product categories. For smartphone brand, Motorola, it is not doing as many pop-up experiences as it would like to. While having a retail presence in a lot of malls, stores and catchment areas, Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing, APAC, Motorola understands that there are untapped audiences which would like to experience the brand’s products at locations where it does not have a retail presence. The brand is evaluating opportunities where it can use this in the future.
Talking to BW Retail World, in an exclusive chat, Shivam Ranjan, Head of Marketing, APAC, Motorola outlined the retail strategy of the brand, the growth of the brand, its in-store experiences, the exclusive Flipkart Experiential Store, and more.
Edited excerpts:
How is Motorola integrating experiential marketing into its strategy to enhance customer engagement and brand experience?
Experiencing the product is important in the final purchase decisions. So when it comes to awareness, that is the first time the consumer gets to know about the product.
When consumers consider the product, they can do their research as well. But when the final purchase intent happens, and specifically for more premium price points, experiential plays a large role. If it’s a lower-cost product, consumers are still okay to buy without experiencing the product. But the higher the price point, the more the consumers want to have a touch and feel and experience the product in hand before making the final purchase decision. So experiencing the product is an important part of the consumer decision-making journey and hence we are investing in it.
We are investing at the point of sale, especially at retail, where you will see us present across modern retail, modern trade, as well as general trade across thousands of stores with warm bodies, which are our promoters, who are there in store with our fixtures, with branding and demos. That’s because the people need to see the phone in action and also props that can demonstrate the features. For example, there are AI features and camera features that we want consumers to see and understand.
With props placed props in our stores, consumers can click a picture to understand how the feature works; we have props that can showcase how an AI feature works to give them the complete experience at the retail store as well.
Apart from that, we also do experiential activities in and around retail catchment areas to drive footfalls to the store. For example, we have done experiential activities at Reliance Digital stores where when launching a product, we have done activations, and consumer engagements at the store venue itself and in the catchment area to be able to drive footfalls and drive engagement with the products.
What kind of a growth has Motorola witnessed in the past quarters in this year of 2024? And what is the CAGR that you’re looking at?
Motorola is growing really fast, both globally, as well as in India. Talking specifically about the Indian market, we’ve been consistently growing for the past two-three years.
We’ve been constantly growing at double digits – premium to market. We are growing essentially 30-50 per cent faster than the market.
Also, I would like to highlight that Motorola is doubling, literally – at least in the financial year 2023, and in every quarter this year, we have nearly doubled versus last year. Also as per the IDC report results for the calendar year, as per Q1 2024 (April, May, June 2024), Motorola is the fastest growing smartphone brand in India at 110 per cent growth. With that kind of pace, our objectives are clearly set in, in terms of being the number three brand in financial year 2025-26.
This is the hyper growth phase for us, as I term it. And we plan to continue this growth phase and be able to achieve our targets comfortably.
What kind of a store count – offline, as well as online, are you present at currently? And what are your targets for the year?
As part of our strategy, primarily we’ve been a very digital heavy brand. But in the past few years, we’ve started expanding into retail, big time.
There are three key ways in which we are doing so. One is definitely to tap into the premium audience through the premium modern trade stores. We’ve got a very strong exclusive partnership with Reliance Digital. Yeah, you too. We are present across all the 600 plus Reliance Digital stores across the country – we’ve got an exclusive zone too, there.
The second approach is to also target the premium general trade stores, which contribute to the most value. That’s where consumers are buying premium products. So again, it is part of our premium strategy where we’ve tapped into about 5000 retail stores – these are premium stores across the country, multi brand stores, wherein we are able to also put up Motorola experience zones and reach out to consumers.
The third way that we are reaching to the bottom of the pyramid and also for our mid segment and low segment smartphones, is that we are looking at an O2O model – the online to offline model. In this, too, we are partnering with Reliance in a big way with JioMart Digital. By maintaining inventory, they enable the retailers to actually buy the products from them. The retailers only buy when they need it, but essentially they are able to reach currently over 100,000 stores.
So, today, we are already present in roughly 35,000 stores across the country through JioMart Digital. We’ve got our presence in exclusive general trade stores and the Reliance Digital stores. So already we have a distribution of around 45,000 stores in the country. And this will continue to increase for us because it is important for consumers, especially in the premium price points, to see, touch and feel and get the experience.
From the online perspective, if you talk about scale, the marketplaces are significantly higher scale than our D2C website at the moment. But we are committed to improving and increasing the scale for the D2C business as well. As seen specifically for super premium products, like products beyond Rs 50,000 etc. consumers tend to be more comfortable with brand websites as compared to marketplaces. So we are definitely looking at scaling up our D2C also. Talking about marketplaces, currently we are present across Flipkart and Amazon.
Flipkart has been our long standing partner – it reaches more than 20,000 pincodes across India. So from an online perspective, we have the entire country addressed and covered, specifically through the marketplaces.
On the retail side, in the Indian market from a smartphone store perspective, the total size is approximately 100,000 stores. Out of which, as you go higher and higher, you tend to reach stores which are smaller and smaller in terms of value contribution. Sometimes it may not be optimal to even be present there because the business value is not as great as the investment that you’re making to be present there. I think it has to be optimised. We are definitely looking at reaching an optimal number of 50,000 plus stores within this year.
How do you use technology such as AR, VR, and AI to create immersive experiences for customers either online or during on-ground activations?
Experiences will become more and more common, especially with the rise of the metaverse and various immersive experiential techniques. Immersive experiences are going to be very significant because that’s something that is emerging.
And for us, the Flipkart Experiential Store is an example of that. We obviously would like to create something even more immersive on our website. So that could be a feature that you will witness with more immersive experiences and an experiential approach on our own D2C website – that is something that we could be working on.
We are also ensuring that we bring in more AR and VR experiences for the consumers to see our products on our digital websites. Additionally, of course, Flipkart is doing it too.
The Flipkart Experiential Store has 3D models and AR experiences built in. But even on our D2C website, you would start seeing us create those interventions to be able to give consumers the real touch-and-feel immersive experience of the products.
Delving into the Flipkart Experiential Store – it was launched a few months back. It is an entirely immersive world and is way bigger than an actual store can be. Our products are placed and our experiences are placed in different locations. You enter the zone and then you walk to one section to experience a particular feature in a particular product, then go on to the next zone to experience a different feature in a different product.
Not all products are available in the experiential zone – we have kept around five or six products – our flagship products – and we showcase the experiences there. For instance, we are one of the only ones in the world to have received a validation from Pantone that what we capture from our cameras are true colours. To experience the Pantone validation, we have showcased AI features etc. wherein the consumer can walk in, tap on the video on the screens inside to play it, tap on the phone to initiate an action and can do and experience a lot of things.
Right now, the purchase option is not enabled through the Flipkart Experiential store, because it’s primarily for experiencing the products. It is a permanent initiative to keep adding our products.
How do you look at enhancing in-store experiences for the consumers? How do you weigh in about what will work and what won’t?
Currently, we don’t have our EBOs, but we believe that we can provide the right amount of experience in multi-brand stores as well.
But we try to create an experiential zone within those stores where one will be able to find a unique experience for Motorola. Specifically, citing the example of Reliance Digital stores – we have a fixture unit where we can showcase multiple products. So, a consumer who walks in gets a choice amongst a range of products to see, check and evaluate.
The second thing is that we can put in props. For example, if a phone is water resistant, they keep a glass of water which can prove to a consumer that once the phone is dipped a phone in water and taken out, it doesn’t get damaged. Seeing is believing – and when you see that happening, you believe it.
Also, for an AI feature like Smart Style Sync – this is a feature wherein if you click a picture of what you’re wearing, AI will generate matching options for your phone wallpaper based on the dress that you are wearing. So the phone will look and match with what you’re wearing. For these kinds of features, not every customer is comfortable getting their picture clicked. To solve that, we have a prop with dresses being showcased on a tabletop. And once you click a picture of that and generate images, you’ll be able to experience what is it that the phone can do.
The third instance is that of the Pantone Validation, for both – the camera and the display of our phones – the colours captured and displayed on our phones are accurate. By asking consumers to click pictures of anything that is kept on the colourful table top that is provided in our experiential zone – and then to match the colours and display of their phone as compared to a Motorola phone. We can show them the difference in colour and display accuracy.
